Culture & Arts

"Growing up," as Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie once said, "is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience... and pimples." But how quickly adults forget. It can be hard to really understand teenagers -- their struggles, their awakenings, their triumphs. But in the new Off Broadway show, One Day, co-directors Michael Sottile and Ray Leeper (from So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With The Stars), bring the teenage experience to light with astonishing beauty, honesty and rawness that is not often addressed on stage.

Based on true journal entries written by teens, Sottile's soulful music, heartfelt lyrics and poetic book combined with Leeper's inventive choreography makes for fine theater. And the actors, (Brenna Bloom, Chase O'Donnell, Marco Ramos, Honey Ribar, Aaron Scheff, Austin Scott, Benjamin Shuman, Andy Spencer, Aliya Stuart, Nyseli Vega and Charlotte Mary Wen), transport us to those adolescent years with their electrifying voices.

Sottile and Leeper shared more about One Day and their collaboration. To read the full interview, click on this story at Parade.com.

Photo used with permission. (Photo credit: Bob Degus)

"Isn't this cool?" I said to him, holding up the t-shirt. It had come as part of singer/songwriter Martin Sexton's pre-order bundle for his new CD, Mixtape Of The Open Road. A list of tour dates skated down the backside. On the front was a cassette tape rendered in retro-distressed style. He stared at it for a couple of seconds and made a snuffling sound.

"What?"

"That doesn't make you feel old?"

"Concert tees never go out of style, baby!"

"No," he said, nodding to the front. "Tapes. Mixtapes. A certain generation has no clue what those things are."

I considered this and first thought I refuse to allow the term "certain generation" in this house. THAT makes me feel old. But, then I realized he was right. The mixtape is a rarefied artifact, and I miss it mightily.

Once upon a time, the mixtape was the audio valentine of choice. It was the preferred method of telling a guy or girl you wanted to hold their sweaty palm in yours and pretend to watch a movie. The quickest and most devastating litmus test of relationship material is the conversation you have about music. I subscribe whole heartedly to that great line spoken by John Cusack's character in High Fidelity: "What really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films -- these things matter. Call me shallow, but it's the fuckin' truth."

In days of yore (aka the '70s), it was relatively easy to suss out a person's musical interests. Vinyl was impossible to escape. If a record collection wasn't arrogantly displayed like the rhino heads and cheetah pelts of big game hunters, that meant: A. The person had something nasty and shameful to hide, like The Best of Bread or Tito Puente Does Motown, or B. Music was not part of their social vernacular. In both cases, your chances of getting laid plummeted. I've never had a date, let alone a relationship, last where his musical tastes did not surpass, compliment, or challenge my own. I remember sitting across from the table on a date with a perfectly nice boy human who told me that music was not really something he "noticed." Check please. That's why the mixtape is such high stakes territory; it's a lyrical Cyrano de Bergerac saying something important to someone that you're too shy or repressed or straight up chicken-shit to say yourself.

Because you're offering up more than what speaks to you musically, you're carving out a piece of your soul and giving it to this person. I know that sounds uber-dramatic, but so isn't adolescence. It's a trail of aural breadcrumbs you're leaving for the person to follow. Will they pick up what you're throwing down and decode your secret message, the one that says I love you or please don't break my heart or are you the one who finally gets me? Will they hear you saying: "I want to show you my brain," or "Can we please get super funky naked together? Like, a lot? Like, as much as humanly possible?" Sidenote: That's the Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Prince mixtape. Potent. You get one of those and manage to keep your panties from dropping, then you belong in a museum next to the statue of Michelangelo's David.

As soon as I knew I liked a boy, I would start mentally building the mixtape. For better or for worse -- usually for worse, in my case, a prematurely-given mixtape is the same as texting someone sitting in front of you who has just given you their digits; it's very bad form -- that kid knew who he was agreeing to sit with on the school bus. The mixtape is as vulnerable as it gets, and that includes the angry, bitter mixtape of tunes that seem to be the only things to adequately convey your roiling angst and searing pain over the one who has done you wrong. I am sure I have a shoebox molding in the back of a closet somewhere with a mixtape or two given to me by boys who ultimately stomped my heart into the dirt. I know if I found them, I would turn the plastic cases over in my hands, study the fading ink of handwriting, suddenly familiar, but also foreign, and without even putting it in a player (a device that no longer exists) would be able to hear each tune and feel the way I did the first time I listened.

I know we don't listen, make, consume or share music today the same way we did even ten years ago. I see the potential in a lot of innovation sweeping across the art space, from books and music to film and graphic design and video games. But there's a part of me that feels the pull to preserve ritual and rite of passage. The shared playlist (the one that could go on in perpetuity. How many Bare Naked Ladies songs can you stand?), the "I burned this for you," just don't hold the same gravitas. They just don't.

I popped Martin Sexton's disc onto the digital turntable spinning inside my laptop and settled in to listen and marvel a little bit over a "certain generation" who will never know what it is to bare your soul in the magnetic spools of a mixtape.

I never see beauty. It is foreign to me and if even I could glimpse it, it would only be in recognition of a struggle gone cold, soon to be discarded as I move on. No satisfaction taken: a corpse kicked to the curb. It's about not knowing how to live, thats what painting is, what is performance, and coming with it, a whole lot of heartbreak.

- Wesley Kimler

Wesley Kimler's Chicago studio

Wesley Kimler, one of the last tough-guy painters, likes his studio chaotic. It's a kind of parallel universe, which suits Kimler fine, since he acknowledges that he has "an inability to live in the real world." Painting furiously, with some of his six exotic birds screeching as he works, Kimler is prone to 48 hours binges and also to re-working "finished" works. Kimler's most recent paintings have themes about war, and he also sees the creative process as a form of destruction. Still, he is clear about why he does what he does: "I make beautiful things for other people."

I recently interviewed Wesley Kimler and asked him to tell me a few stories, and share some of his opinions about art and artists.

Wesley Kimler: Photo by Amina Dollah Kimler

John Seed Interviews Wesley Kimler

JS: So, tell me about this tough childhood of yours...

WK: I left home at 14: I was on the run.

I was looking to get out of a bad situation at home and I just had to get away from where I was. As far as what I was looking for, I suppose I lacked intent -- it was kind of like being shot from gun -- I had run away so many times that when I finally got caught and went in front of a judge he said:

"Either you get into some kind of military boarding school or we are going to put you in one of our schools."

My hero at the time was the character Paul Newman played in Cool Hand Luke, so, I said "Yes sir, judge," went home, found 22 dollars, got on a Greyhound bus and never went back. I grew up in the south of Market area of San Francisco, which at the time was a sizable area of downtown. It was a derelict district full of large dilapidated SRO hotels. I lived in them all at one point or another. I was a street kid.

Wesley Kimler: Photo by Amina Dollah Kimler

JS: How did you get through all this?

WK: One of the things that saved me and taught me how to survive is that I ended up being arrested with a small amount of pot, and even though I was underage I lied my way through two months of incarceration in San Francisco city and the county jail. My alias was "John Russell," from another Paul Newman film: Hombre.

Hey Hoooombre: you have put a hole in me!

I had to grow up pretty suddenly to survive that: afterwards the streets were a piece of cake. I was the prince of my domain, which consisted of all of south of Market between Third and Sixth Street. I remember stepping over the drunken winos, and being used to everything smelling of stale booze and vomit from one dusty hotel room to another as I could scrounge up the means. Of course, I was secure in knowing if I couldn't find some money on any given day, there was always Saint Anthony's Kitchen over in The Tenderloin district for stale donuts and watery beans.

Untitled

JS: So this all left you toughened up, and ready to move to Afghanistan, right?

WK: Well... yes! By the time I was 20 years old I was living in Afghanistan keeping apartments there in Kabul, Herat and Kandahar: I was working for an importer. I gotta say, it did get pretty out of control wild at times.

Afghanistan back then was like an eleventh century version of the Wild West. Living there was my real education -- my university you might say -- and graduating meant you didn't get yourself killed. I was still 20 (maybe 21) years old when I had to take a gun away from a man and kidnap him. I dragged his ass across Afghanistan and held him for ransom until he and his family coughed up the money they had stolen from the man I worked for. Just that one story is a would make a nice feature article someday for the Huffington Post...

The whole episode culminated on the dusty streets of Heart, Afghanistan, with me taking on this guy and his family and then the both of us being carted off to the Herat prison -- where fortunately the Turkish sergeant liked how kind of tough and hell or high-water I was -- and took up my cause. Abdul Awaz went to jail and I went free: a good thing as at that point they still had balls and chains for the prisoners.

Afghan Kite

JS: Wesley, I'm betting that a single article would barely scratch the surface. Give me one more good story and then we'll talk about art.

WK: I have always carried with me the images of my last afternoon in Afghanistan, as they reverberate and resonate through my life to this day. I was leaving with mixed emotions: I so loved the place and I had been there a long time. Anyways, I was traveling in the back of a lorry with 20-25 Pathans (Afghans) going through the gun turreted no-man's land lunar landscape of the Khyber Pass. It's a tribal area and you can only travel through their during the day.

Well, there was one Americanized lost soul of an Afghan who had been to a university here and of course he decided to adopt me as his ally/fellow sophisticate, in this truckload of illiterates. On and on he went about his backwards fellow countrymen: he was of course dressed in a suit, so proud of his university education. He didn't seem to get that I was dressed like everyone else in the truck that perhaps my sympathies were not 100% with him.

Anyways, we pulled up at the edge of a muddy gulch where a chai shop had been dug back into a cliff and I sat there and watched this man, child in his arms, black turban double rows of bullets crossing his chest, rifles slung on his back and then turned to his father -- his reverse image wearing a white turban -- and we spoke. I told them both how much I loved their country and how I had learned so much how much I didn't want to leave. Anyways, the old man got up, motioned to me C'mon and the three of us went in the back where there was a large hookah sitting there.

The black turbanned dude put some hashish in the pipe and his father admonished him: Don't be so cheap! Put a bigger chunk! Next, a hot coal was placed over the now larger chunk of hashish and we commenced smoking. It was strong, very strong, and I started coughing. At which point the Americanized Afghan burst into the room yelling: 'Mister, mister! don't do that ! It will make you crazy!

In response, the old man pointed to the door and replied:

"Burro baha'i! (Go by god!) This young man is more of an Afghan than you will ever be."

That remains, to this day the greatest compliment, I've ever received. It was the moment when I first considered the inherent dichotomy of the self-realized individual as opposed to the university driven generic.

Works on paper in progress

JS: As a university driven generic I need to think about that Wesley, but you tell a great story. Now tell me what happened next when you got back to the states.

WK: I started painting upon my returning from Afghanistan. I moved to Austin Texas where my formal studies began at Laguna Gloria School of Art. I painted with the little old ladies who were busy painting grandson Johnny or a niece and nephew's portrait. The little old ladies were for the most part badasses. I painted portraits, seascapes and still lifes. And yes, even then the comments were always along the lines of: "There is something different about your work Wesley. You are going to go do something larger than this place."

Funny enough when I went to a regular art school (MCAD) everyone was like WHERE did you learn to paint like that? With the little old ladies is where...

Untitled (Seascape)

JS: How did you get your nickname: "The Shark"?

WK: You bring up my old alter ego 'The Shark,' which I employed while being the leader/mascot /driving force behind Shark Forum blogsite here in Chicago. Shark Forum served multiple purposes: first it was a weapon I used to attack institutional hackademic art world apparatchiks that run rough roughshod over the Chicago scene emanating from the art education system. Primarily at this point in time, SAIC. The Shark, swam in a cesspool of institutionalized corruption pushing academic conformity/ mediocrity.

War, Kite Flyers: for Shannon, 2015, 9 x18 feet, alkyd resin on canvas

JS: So you have some pretty stinging things to say about the Chicago art scene...

WK: Of course Chicago can surely be seen as metaphor for the toweringly stupid art world of the moment. Its such a sea of shit awash in massive piles of stupid money: where to begin taking on this dystopia?

Wesley Kimler: Photo by Amina Dollah Kimler

JS: What about New York?

WK: Look at The Forever Now exhibition now on view at MOMA in New York: not a good painter in sight. Much has been written about how bad it is. As Christian Viveros-Faune noted, it should be called Forever Sucks. But then, everyone is using the pejorative term Walter Robinson coined -- Zombie Formalism -- which is great.

In NYC we are looking at massive decline and a whole power structure in place: holding the reins, clinging to power. As far as critics go, I like Jerry Saltz quite a lot. He is a good man and in ways the equivalent H.L. Mencken of today's art world. That doesn't mean he knows anything about painting. I am convinced actually, that he wouldn't know a good painting if it came up and bit him on the ass. The problem is that he's not alone!

Operation: Foragers (Admiral Raymond Spruance), 2015
12 x9 feet, alkyd resin on canvas

JS: Who are your artist heroes?

WK: As a kid I would wander through the old Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and scratch my head at those strange David Park paintings. Even after a few years of art school I was far more interested in the Bay Area Funk scene -- Roy De Forrest with his psychedelic dogs -- and then I changed and started seeing the way I see even now. I love early Joan Brown and her work became very important to me: also Diebenkorn, early Paul Wonner and Frank Lobdell. But first and foremost is David Park.

I like a wide range of painting going back in history: what serious painter doesn't? Titian was good...

I think we can ixnay the lower strata of Impressionism and revisit Gerome and Messionier: some revisionism might be in order there. Malcolm Morley I have always liked the whole London school: particularly Kossoff. My friend Don Suggs is a brilliant painter as is another pal Ashley Bickerton.

Mark Dutcher and I have become fast friends: he is a wonderful painter who is just now unfolding. Ed Moses is a dear friend and hero of mine for sure both as a painter and as a man. And of course Joan Mitchell and de Kooning are important to me, but so is Lee Bontecou.

The Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard is doing interesting work.

Studio View

JS: What would you say is the situation of painting right now?

WK: There is all kinds of art and all kinds of painting. No matter your preference, there are good versions and bad versions. The trouble is that in this age of visual illiteracy, the people in power are clueless as to the difference.

I never see beauty. It is foreign to me and if even I could glimpse it, it would only be in recognition of a struggle gone cold, soon to be discarded as I move on. No satisfaction taken: a corpse kicked to the curb. It's about not knowing how to live, thats what painting is, what is performance, and coming with it, a whole lot of heartbreak. -- Wesley Kimler

Wesley Kimler's Chicago studio

Wesley Kimler, one of the last tough-guy painters, likes his studio chaotic. It's a kind of parallel universe, which suits Kimler fine, since he acknowledges that he has "an inability to live in the real world." Painting furiously, with some of his six exotic birds screeching as he works, Kimler is prone to 48 hour painting binges and also to re-working "finished" canvases. Kimler's most recent paintings have themes of war and he sees the creative process as a form of destruction. Still, he is clear about why he does what he does: "I make beautiful things for other people."

I recently interviewed Wesley Kimler and asked him to tell me a few stories, and share some of his opinions about art and artists.

Wesley Kimler: Photo by Amina Dollah Kimler

John Seed Interviews Wesley Kimler

JS: So, tell me about this tough childhood of yours...

WK: I left home at 14: I was on the run.

I was looking to get out of a bad situation at home and I just had to get away from where I was. As far as what I was looking for, I suppose I lacked intent -- it was kind of like being shot from gun -- I had run away so many times that when I finally got caught and went in front of a judge he said:

"Either you get into some kind of military boarding school or we are going to put you in one of our schools."

My hero at the time was the character Paul Newman played in Cool Hand Luke, so I said: "Yes sir, judge!" went home, found 22 dollars, got on a Greyhound bus and never went back. I grew up in the south of Market area of San Francisco, which at the time was a sizable area of downtown. It was a derelict district full of large dilapidated SRO hotels. I lived in them all at one point or another. I was a street kid.

Untitled

JS: So this all left you toughened up, and ready to move to Afghanistan, right?

WK: Well... yes! By the time I was 20 years old I was living in Afghanistan keeping apartments there in Kabul, Herat and Kandahar: I was working for an importer. I gotta say, it did get pretty out of control wild at times.

Afghanistan back then was like an eleventh century version of the Wild West. Living there was my real education -- my university you might say -- and graduating meant you didn't get yourself killed. I was still 20 (maybe 21) years old when I had to take a gun away from a man and kidnap him. I dragged his ass across Afghanistan and held him for ransom until he and his family coughed up the money they had stolen from the man I worked for. Just that one story is a would make a nice feature article someday for the Huffington Post...

The whole episode culminated on the dusty streets of Herat, Afghanistan, with me taking on this guy and his family and then the both of us being carted off to the Herat prison -- where fortunately the Turkish sergeant liked how kind of tough and hell or high-water I was -- and took up my cause. Abdul Awaz went to jail and I went free: a good thing as at that point they still had balls and chains for the prisoners.

Afghan Kite

JS: Wesley, I'm betting that a single article would barely scratch the surface. Give me one more good story and then we'll talk about art.

WK: I have always carried with me the images of my last afternoon in Afghanistan, as they reverberate and resonate through my life to this day. I was leaving with mixed emotions: I so loved the place and I had been there a long time. Anyways, I was traveling in the back of a lorry with 20-25 Pathans (Afghans) going through the gun turreted no-man's land lunar landscape of the Khyber Pass. It's a tribal area and you can only travel through there during the day.

Well, there was one Americanized lost soul of an Afghan who had been to a university here and of course he decided to adopt me as his ally/fellow sophisticate, in this truckload of illiterates. On and on he went about his backwards fellow countrymen: he was of course dressed in a suit, so proud of his university education. He didn't seem to get that I was dressed like everyone else in the truck that perhaps my sympathies were not 100% with him.

Anyways, we pulled up at the edge of a muddy gulch where a chai shop had been dug back into a cliff and I sat there and watched this man, child in his arms, black turban double rows of bullets crossing his chest, rifles slung on his back and then turned to his father -- his reverse image wearing a white turban -- and we spoke. I told them both how much I loved their country and how I had learned so much how much I didn't want to leave. Anyways, the old man got up, motioned to me C'mon and the three of us went in the back where there was a large hookah sitting there.

The black turbanned dude put some hashish in the pipe and his father admonished him: Don't be so cheap! Put a bigger chunk! Next, a hot coal was placed over the now larger chunk of hashish and we commenced smoking. It was strong, very strong, and I started coughing. At which point the Americanized Afghan burst into the room yelling: 'Mister, mister! don't do that ! It will make you crazy!

In response, the old man pointed to the door and replied:

"Burro baha'i! (Go by god!) This young man is more of an Afghan than you will ever be."

That remains, to this day the greatest compliment, I've ever received. It was the moment when I first considered the inherent dichotomy of the self-realized individual as opposed to the university driven generic.

The drawing wall in Wesley Kimler's studio

JS: What would you say is the situation of painting right now?

WK: There are all kinds of art and all kinds of painting. No matter your preference, there are good versions and bad versions. The trouble is that in this age of visual illiteracy, the people in power are clueless as to the difference.

This post originally appeared on Bustle

By JR Thorpe

We tend to think of classic black-and-white films as pretty bad ground for women's equality. The ladies in them look fantastic, sure, but the gender politics can be fairly awful: They're there to look silly, make catty remarks and ultimately do the "natural" thing and bow to love and marriage. Right? Wrong. While that depressing state of affairs does characterize many old-school films, there are several stunning examples in classic cinema of powerful women kicking caboose and taking names on their own terms.

So, what qualifies as a seriously feminist film for this list's purposes? For one, the focus can't be on ultimately being "tamed" by a man: the amazing Female (1933) starring Ruth Chatterton, about a tough female boss of a huge automotive factory who uses men and does what she likes, is fantastic until the last 10 minutes, when she's basically bullied into marriage and children because that's "what women are born for." (Yes, that is an actual piece of dialogue.) And complicated, driven women are in, but woman-on-woman "shrewish" competition is out -- hence The Women (1939), an all-female romp about competing for a man's attention, doesn't make the cut.

Ultimately, it's all about taking female strength and purpose seriously -- and, in some of the films, it's not even remarked upon that a woman would want to take charge of her own destiny and make her own choices. It's simply a fact. That's pretty radical, even in today's films. Here are nine classic films which feature strong, complex, well-rounded women.

1. Mildred Pierce (1945)

Mildred Pierce was one of the first films to showcase an ambitious career woman as a central character: in this flick, Joan Crawford, as the mother who pushes incredibly hard and sacrifices virtually everything for her nasty little spoilt daughter. Mildred isn't unflawed -- but she's powerful, and intent on getting what she deserves.

2. The Little Foxes (1941)

This film was actually pretty remarkable for the time, because it featured a Southern aristocratic belle who wasn't a brat or markedly hopeless. Instead, Regina, played by the awesome Bette Davis, is fighting her brothers for her well-deserved share of their inheritance. Regina inevitably goes too far in her pursuit of justice, but her rage against the confines of her gender is palpable and accepted.

3. The African Queen (1951)

Now mostly famous for pairing Katharine Hepburn with a spectacularly grumpy Humphrey Bogart, this film should be better known for the fact that Hepburn's character drives the whole thing: She and Bogart get stranded in a German-controlled bit of Africa at the outbreak of WWI, and she hatches a plan to convert their knackered boat into a gunboat and torpedo a German warship upriver. And she's more than a match for Bogart's embittered captain, intellectually and emotionally.

4. I'm No Angel (1933)

Oh, Mae West, how we love you. West was one of the first female comedians to get the big bucks and be frank about her sexuality. I'm No Angel, which she also wrote, features her in a lot of romantic entanglements (at least five) as a burlesque dancer, and while she does eventually find true love, she does it with some feminist ass-kicking. She sues her ex-fiancée (who was tricked into breaking off the engagement) for breach of promise, cross-examines all her ex-lovers herself, wins the case and gets back together with him. Score 100 points to West.

5. His Girl Friday (1940)

This screwball comedy from Howard Hawks looks pretty normal on the surface -- Cary Grant uses every trick in the book to lure his best worker and ex-wife, Rosalind Russell, back to him -- but it's actually pretty subversive. Rosalind, as Hildy, is clearly the brains of the operation, and she and Grant match wits and ambition all the way to the inevitable happy ending.

6. Queen Christina (1933)

Greta Garbo stars as the gender-bending, completely non-compromising Queen Christina of Sweden, who was renowned for dressing in men's clothes in an attempt to be taken seriously in the patriarchal environment of the Swedish court. In real life, Christina's story was more interesting -- she abdicated her throne because she didn't want to marry anybody, for one thing -- but Garbo's Christina is an intensely powerful woman who makes difficult choices for her people and herself.

7. La souriante Madame Beudet (1922)

This surrealist short is regarded as the first truly feminist film: a woman imagines the death of her stupid, humiliating husband, before a twist keeps her imprisoned in the marriage. It's very much from her point of view, and depicts her as intelligent and fully-formed. It's both very silly and very sad.

8. The Thin Man (1934)

The Thin Man movies, based on the novels of Dashiell Hammett, are technically all about Nick Charles' (William Powell) pursuits of criminals and murderers, but it's his marriage to Nora (Myrna Loy) that got the headlines. And deservedly so: Nora, based on Hammett's own partner Lillian Hellmann, is an equal, trades wisecracks at every opportunity, and is enraged when Nick, in a fit of justifiable chivalry, knocks her out to prevent her being shot at a crucial moment. "I wanted to see you get him!" she yells. Damn straight.

9. All About Eve (1950)

If you see one film on this list, make it this one. While the terrifying Eve, who manipulates everybody to supplant actress Bette Davis and get all her fame and roles, is a bit sociopathic, it's the serious Davis who carries the picture: she's a fully-rounded, highly intelligent, very sad character with huge flaws and high ambitions. That's what feminist cinema is really about: not perfect women, but ones who try to take charge of their destinies, have real weaknesses and come to know their own strength.

Images: Wikimedia Commons

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10 Classic Movies You've Never Seen, Starring Actors You Already Love, That You're About to Be Obsessed With

9 Perfect Beauty Moments From Your Favorite Cult Films To Inspire Your Next Makeover

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Daredevil Maria Kochetkova and the passionate Joseph Walsh in Jerome Robbins' Dances at a Gathering (Photo: Erik Tomasson)

At 6:32 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Thursday night, Ballet to the People paused on her way to the War Memorial Opera House to gaze skyward. In the company of other San Franciscans, she watched a "visible passing" of the International Space Station. Good sightings of the ISS are infrequent, and depend on the earth's rotation and the clarity of the sky. For three minutes we stood, motionless, following the arc of its journey eastward in the dusky sky. The sight never fails to thrill: like an exceptionally bright star, the Space Station zooms across the sky at nearly five miles per second, manned by American, Russian, European and Japanese astronauts who spend their days conducting scientific research and testing the effects of zero gravity on their bodies.

At 8:58 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, ten San Francisco Ballet dancers stood motionless on stage, at the close of Jerome Robbins' heroic Dances at a Gathering, gazing skyward in their own ritual Space Station sighting, as the wistful chords of a Chopin "night piece" rained lightly down. The previous hour had been spent negotiating the earth's gravity with an insouciance that belied these dancers' formidable technique.

This plotless masterpiece, affectionately known as DAAG, opens as the Man in Brown - Joseph Walsh, whose thrilling dancing unites lyricism and bravura - relives a bittersweet memory. Watching him from the pit, magician Roy Bogas spins this memory into Chopin's poignant Mazurka Op. 63 No. 3.

Part of the genius of this work is that the dance does not arise, like most dances, in response to the music; rather, it seems to inspire the musician to create the music on the spot - a feigned improvisation, for which Chopin's mercurial moods prove perfect. On the bare stage, balletic movements punctuated by hints of Eastern European folk dance (Robbins claimed to be inspired by his Russian Jewish heritage), are interpreted with a simplicity and a deliberate avoidance of style and stylishness that make us question the boundary between dance and ordinary human movement.

The people in Walsh's memory (identified in the program only by the colour of their summery garb) drift on and offstage. They tease, seduce, fall in and out of love, spur, pester, protect and commiserate with each other, revealing poetry in their mundane lives. Weather happens: a couple, caught in a storm, spin delightedly. A hint of tragedy emerges as two women stretch out, rigid and still, in the arms of two men.

The poetic Vanessa Zahorian falls for Carlo Di Lanno in Dances at a Gathering (Photo: Erik Tomasson)

Vanessa Zahorian (Mauve) shows perhaps the greatest range of feeling, delicate in the expressive yearning of her upper body, at other times a gale-force wind. Her early duet with Carlo Di Lanno (Green) to a lilting waltz is innocent and playful; a later duet, to a heartbreaking mazurka, is stately and deliberate, leaving many things between them unsaid. Maria Kochetkova (Pink) never seems truly happy unless she's doing something dangerous, in which she is aided and abetted by Davit Karapetyan, later by Joseph Walsh. Karapetyan dances a solo like butter, his double air turns melting into a deep knee bend. Later, he and Walsh betray a cordial rivalry in an anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better duet. Mathilde Froustey is a zephyr in yellow; at the end of a sunny, jazz-inflected duet with the irresistible Vitor Luiz (Brick), she dives enthusiastically into his waiting arms, partway into the wings.

The mood turns pensive, though not for long. Sensing change is in the air, Doris André (Blue), Kochetkova and Zahorian huddle together, warily stretching their legs outward, like antennas.

San Francisco Ballet dancers in flight in Dances at a Gathering (Photo: Erik Tomasson)

In a feisty dance of independence, Lorena Feijoo (Green) mocks those women-of-a-certain-age who fear loneliness. Yet later she becomes a powerful force of nature. In a sextet, Di Lanno, Karapetyan and Steven Morse (Blue) toss André, Froustey and Zahorian playfully into the air. Even when airborne, the main quality of this cast is a wonderful groundedness, a weightiness missing from DAAG as performed by some companies.

San Francisco Ballet in Liam Scarlett's Hummingbird (Photo: Erik Tomasson)

An inspired programming coup pairs DAAG with Liam Scarlett's Hummingbird, another plotless ballet, new last season. Wunderkind of the Royal Ballet, Scarlett wrests unexpected emotions from Philip Glass' relentless Piano Concerto No. 1. Co-conspirators John Macfarlane (set and costumes) and David Finn (lighting) have designed a post-apocalyptic world, the stage overhung by an enormous, curved, shimmering sail that rolls up and down to reveal more or less of a metallic quarter pipe running the full width of the stage, down which the dancers slide or roll to make their appearance. With the exception of Yuan Yuan Tan and Luke Ingham, dressed in white, the ensemble is outfitted in shades of industrial grey and indigo. The effect is both oppressive and uplifting.

Like DAAG, Hummingbird hints at complicated, even tragic, backstories, but if we come away undecided as to what was really going on in this world, it is not with a sense of frustration, but exhilaration at the possibilities.

Yuan Yuan Tan and Luke Ingham in Hummingbird (Photo: Erik Tomasson)

Tan and Ingham appear to be trapped in a bad relationship. She may have found out something terrible about him - perhaps he is a Russian spy, or a bigamist. Frances Chung, who opens up the piece with Gennadi Nedvigin, may be the steely spymaster. The thrill-seeking Maria Kochetkova joins forces with Joan Boada to break free from the tyrannical intelligence apparatus. In the end she is propelled triumphantly through the air by the gentlemen of the ensemble, perhaps signaling the heroic destruction of the surveillance state.

Scarlett elicits magnificent performances from all, including the very fine Isabella DeVivo, Emma Rubinowitz, James Sofranko and Hansuke Yamamoto in demi-soloist parts, as well as the eight-person Greek chorus. Martin West captained the orchestra steadfastly through the score which, like an ocean roiled by passing storms, turns ominous, tempestuous, then momentarily serene. Pianist Brenda Tom attacked the Glass with vigor, in sharp contrast to Roy Bogas' heavenly, limpid renderings of Chopin.

Gennadi Nedvigin and Frances Chung in Hummingbird (Photo: Erik Tomasson)

In the future, when space stations whizzing overhead are no longer objects of fascination, and space travel becomes as common as riding the BART, when we encounter alien life forms in far flung galaxies who inevitably challenge us to display the superiority of humankind, let's just throw San Francisco Ballet's sensational Program 4 at them and be done with it.

- San Francisco Ballet's Program 4 continues through March 8, 2015, alternating with Program 3, featuring the world première of Myles Thatcher's Manifesto. -

Steven Wilson is at it again. The critically acclaimed and über-prolific musician and producer has released his fourth proper solo album. His body of work is beyond impressive, especially when you factor in the albums he has remixed.

His latest effort is a full-fledged concept album. Hand. Cannot. Erase. is nothing short of an epic tale of modern-day isolation. Wilson wrote the songs from a female perspective, finding inspiration for the concept and story in the fascinating case of Joyce Carol Vincent -- an attractive woman in the UK who died in her apartment in 2003. While that may not be entirely uncommon, no one missed her for three years -- not her family, nor her friends. (For more on the Vincent story, see the chilling documentary Dreams of a Life.)

Here's a snippet of the album:

Wilson's PR team sent me an advanced copy of the album in late January. It's beautiful and haunting. As with many great prog records, there's no shortage of musical layers, instruments and themes.

PS: Today I am very pleased to be joined by one of my favorite musicians, the very talented, the very prolific Mr. Steven Wilson. We are going to talk primarily about his new album Hand. Cannot. Erase. It is in my view not just a great listen but also very important social commentary. Steven, how are you doing today?

I'm very good. Thank you for that very flattering introduction.

PS: Can you talk about Joyce Carol Vincent? When and how did you come to hear of her?

SW: Joyce Carol Vincent was a story about ten years ago in the UK in 2006. She was found dead in her North London flat. Her body had been there for three years undiscovered. That's not the sort of thing you forget in a hurry. That story was kind of very shocking, but it was only when I saw the documentary about her called Dreams of a Life about three years ago. I began to understand a lot more about Joyce Carol Vincent, and that she was not as I had assumed. I think most people would assume she was not a lonely little old lady. She was quite the opposite. She was a young, attractive and popular woman who potentially had many friends and family. It kind of made the story even more strange, even more shocking, but in a way, I could also understand how something like this could happen. I, myself, lived in London for 20 years and I never knew my next-door neighbors. I never knew what they did. I never knew their names. They didn't know what I did for a living, and they didn't know my name.

I think there's something very peculiar about living in the city and not part of the major metropolis; that actually makes it remarkably easy to disappear. And particularly, if in the case of Joyce Carol Vincent, by choice, if you deliberately kind of erase yourself in a way, it's remarkable to do that. It's easier to that outside of the city where everyone knows everyone else's business. The story of Joyce Carol Vincent for me became they symbol of what it means to be living in the city in the 21^st century in the age of the internet and all this other stuff that supposedly brings us closer together as human beings. But, actually, the way I see it is it actually makes us disconnect more and more from each other.

PS: When you read about Joyce Carol Vincent and you saw that very moving documentary, did you immediately think that her story would serve as the basis for your next album?

SW: There wasn't like a eureka moment, if that's what you mean. No, I think it was more a question of once you've seen that documentary, once you know the story, it's the kind of thing you do carry around with you and it's not easy to forget. It's not easy to brush away to a part in your mind; it stays with you, kind of haunts you. I didn't necessarily say to myself: "OK, great, that's the idea for the next record, that's the story I'm going to write." But, I did carry it around with me. When I came to start writing new music about 18 months ago, I didn't want to be pretentious and say the subject kind of chose me, but there was a sense that this was still kind of rattling around in my mind, and I found myself beginning to write about, not about Joyce Carol Vincent, but about a fictional character which was very much based on her story.

PS: Okay, can you talk a little bit about the meaning of the title, Hand. Cannot. Erase.?

SW: You know what? I'm not going to say so much about that, but I'm going to explain to you why I don't want to tell you too much about the title. For me, giving a title to an album is kind of a necessary evil in a way. You have to give your album a title. But one of the problems with doing that is in a way once you title your album, you are kind of telling them what the story's about, what the album is about. You are telling them this is what the album is about. I could have very easily called this album the Loneliness of Living in the City or something even much more directly specific about this content of the record. And, of course, that would have been a fair enough title because it is about that, but the point is it's all about many other things, too. In this album there are songs about loneliness, nostalgic of childhood, the internet, 21^st century, isolation, alienation, lots of other things as well, lies and anger, and all these things. They are all in this album, so rather than give it a very specific title, I chose something I thought would be ambiguous. It's still a pleasing title but still leaves things fairly open-ended and leaves it for people to make up their own mind about what the album is and what the album is about. It doesn't have a meaning for me, but I didn't want to be too specific about it.

PS: Okay, that's fair enough. You mentioned some of the tracks, so let's talk about them. "Home Invasion" is a really powerful track in my opinion. Can you talk a little bit about that one and how it came together?

SW: "Home Invasion" is kind of a little bit of a musical journey within itself. I think of the album overall as kind of a musical journey, but that one almost has a musical journey within it. It goes through many different changes. There's a jazz section, and there's funky section, and then there's like a spacey section.

Those kind of songs are the hardest ones to put together for me because it's almost like you're juggling lots of different ideas, lots of different sections and you're trying to find the one way that makes the most logical sense from a listening point of view. I am very happy with the way it came out because it ultimately did come together in a very eying logical way for me. The song itself is about the Internet. It's about this idea of social networking, and it's about this idea that you can in a way redefine yourself and redefine your personality online to project an image of yourself closest to the one you would like, if you see what I mean.

There's a line in there, "Download the life you wish you had." I think there is something about the Internet which gives people almost an opportunity to role play and to create a façade, an image. I see that as quite a dangerous development because I think what we call social networking, Twitter, Facebook, etc., is actually quite antisocial. It's a way for people to have the illusion of communicating with each other, connecting with each other. In fact, in truth is social networking makes it easier to disconnect, to kind of hide behind social networking, Facebook, cell phones, Twitter and all this stuff. It's a song really about that and my concerns about that side of technology in the 21^st century. It connects to my central character.

PS: The female vocals on the album are quite emotive. I was wondering if you could talk about who provided them and how you came to know that person or persons?

SW: Obviously, once I had this idea for the subject matter on the record, and I knew the character would be a female character, straightaway that was a challenge for me. I had to write the lyrics, and write the story, and write the blog and all the stuff that goes with the album from the perspective of a female character. It is something I've never done before.

SW:That was my first challenge, and out of that challenge in a way came this thought: your character is female and you should have a female presence on the record -- not just write through this female character but actually have a female voice literally a female voice on the record.

SW: I have two female voices on the record. First, I have the voice of the British actress who relates the story on "Perfect Life," and then I have this wonderful Israeli singer, Ninet Tayeb. She was recommended to me by my Blackfield colleague Aviv Geffen. We've had a partnership and made a few records together. That was one of three singers actually that auditioned for that particular song which is the key song that the female voice sings. Hers was the voice that literally blew me away. I think I was looking for something specific, and I guess I was looking for my Kate Bush or my Björk -- I didn't want such a generic female voice. I wanted someone who had more of a quirky, powerful quality to her voice, almost have control, and Ninet definitely had that so when I heard her voice I knew she was the one.

PS: You previously alluded to the blog and the website for the album. As you've done with previous records, on this one you included some really beautiful artwork, and extended the story in a way that a simple lyric sheet could not do the same on the website. Can you talk a little bit more about the presentation of this physical record before we talk a little bit the forthcoming tour?

SW: This is a story that mostly takes place in isolation. There is no dialogue between the character and other human beings, so much of the dialogue is kind of internal. It's like an almost internal monologue which is happening with herself. Now how to present that--well, the answer I came up with was obviously this woman would perhaps be writing some kind of diary or the modern equivalent of course would be some kind of online blog. She may not be writing for anyone in particular. She may be writing just as a pure kind of indulgence, but having established that is the way she communicates her ideas and her thoughts and her day. That became a wonderful kind of device for, as you say, for revealing more about the character, more about the concept behind the record. We have this diary and blog which is taking place over a few years of this young woman's life. As she gradually becomes more and more isolated, her thoughts become more and more surreal. You're not quite sure at the end whether some of it is actually reality or if it's fantasy. I like that kind of ambiguity. That gave an opportunity, of course, to illustrate the blog and the diary. In this whole kind of package, there are a lot of different sources. There's photography, illustration, a child's diary -- written by a 13-year-old girl who obviously has a very different look again to the grown up blog. It has become a real gift actually for a proposition of interpretation and I'm really happy with the way it's turned out.

PS: It looks great and that's certainly part of the experience that you can't get from either downloading it digitally or stealing the music outright. There's a presentation I noticed with all of your records (including Porcupine Tree) that makes you want to own them.

SW: That's kind of the idea. I grew up with vinyl records and remember the pleasure and the kind of buzz that I got from buying a beautiful vinyl record with the sleeve and the lyrics -- all that kind of tactile experience that you could get from an old vinyl record.

I do think it's a way to still carry that tradition forward in the packaging, not just with vinyl but also with specific editions in the way you present the digital versions, too. It's a shame that more people don't sort of don't give more attention to the way they present their art. But for me it's always been kind of synonymous with the music, the creativity doesn't just end with you writing the songs, it carries through to the artwork, the website, and the live show, of course.

PS: I'll get you out of here on this: Who will be joining you to play and support the album on tour this year?

SW: Well I've actually got a change that's going to take place between the European and the American legs because I lose a couple of my musicians, they have their own bands, so I lose my guitar player and drummer before we come to America. The tour in America will include myself, obviously, as well as Nick Beggs on bass, stick and backing vocals, and Adam Holzman on keyboards. Both of those guys have been in my band since the beginning. And then two new guys, a guitar player Dave Kilminster who has been playing with Roger Waters for the last eight years. A lot of people would have seen him basically being Dave Gilmour, but he's a versatile player. And there's a new drummer called Craig Blundell, a British guy and a fantastic drummer. It's going to be basically a five-piece band, but we're going to have a lot of visual stuff going on, too -- a quadraphonic sound system as we've had on previous tours. We will be running films and visuals and projections. Like I said, this concept is really a gift for vision interpretation. It's going to be a real multimedia really immersive experience I hope.

PS: That's great. Well I am looking forward to seeing you, hopefully in Los Angeles. Steven. I want to thank you for your time, and wish you nothing but the best with the forthcoming album and subsequent tour.

SW: My pleasure, Phil. Nice to speak to you.

In 1992, my musical partner and I -- now my wife as well -- released a kids/family recording called Nobody Else Like Me: Celebrating the Diversity of Children. It was our dream to have a beautiful children's chorus sing Fred Small's song, "Everything Possible," with us. The song is, at its core, about a parent's unconditional love for their child. But in 1992, with references to gay and lesbian people, the song was deemed too "controversial." This was the time of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" being the new policy in the military, and marriage equality being a gleam in the eye of few same-sex couples.

Many parents thought the song should be an anthem in every elementary school in the country. But others refused to let their child sing on the song, or even sing on the recording, if we were going to include that song.

So what were the "controversial" lyrics?

We have cleared off the table, the leftovers saved
Washed the dishes and put them away
I have told you a story and tucked you in tight
At the end of your knockabout day
As the moon sets its sail to carry you to sleep
Over the midnight sea
I will sing you a song no one sang to me
May it keep you good company

Refrain
You can be anybody you want to be
You can love whomever you will
You can travel any country where your heart leads
And know I will love you still
You can live by yourself
You can gather friends around
You can choose one special one
And the only measure of your words and your deeds will be the love you leave behind when you're gone

There are girls who grow up strong and bold
There are boys quiet and kind
Some place on ahead, some follow behind
Some go on their own way and time
Some women love women
Some men love men
Some raise children, some never do
You can dream all the day never reaching the end of everything possible for you

Don't be rattled by names
By taunts, by games
But seek out spirits true
If you give your friends the best part of yourself
They will give the same back to you.

© By Fred Small, Pine Barrens Music, BMI

Today these lyrics seem far less "threatening" than they did in 1992, when a few parents went so far as to say that if the song was on the recording, their children could not sing on any of the songs. We told them that we honored their decisions. We also informed them that the song would not involve this children's chorus, but it might have a different chorus, or be on the recording without a chorus, and they would find out when the recording was released. They understood that their choices would not censure ours. At the time it was the best decision we could make and not compromise our values.

So, what happened? A few families dropped out and a few parents were angry. Others were excited to have their children sing such beautiful, loving lyrics, and were very disappointed that this would not happen. It was clearly a reflection of the times. We included the song on the recording as a trio with our friend, David Roth. Meantime, twenty families had discussions together they hadn't planned and the kids learned more about their parents, while the parents learned about the kids. Music is a great way to instigate important conversations and that certainly happened.

Fast forward to 2015. No need to say how different things are, not simply for LGBT families, but the increasing diversity of all types of families.

Twenty-two years later, we finally recorded our "bucket list" album, DANCIN' IN THE KITCHEN: Songs for ALL Families, coming back to this topic and many others. We wrote or collected not just one song, but fourteen songs that celebrate diverse families, crossing lines that would have been nearly taboo in 1992: a child dealing with divorced parents and two homes, gay parents, gay kids, dysfunctional, but funny dinner table conversations, and multi-racial families. We also celebrate, identical twins, dogs' birthdays grandparents, and the ultimate message-unconditional love for who each one of us.

It's a new day, a new time, and thanks to the hard work of so many organizations and individuals, a better one for diverse families and for children who don't fit traditional molds. In April 2014, a young music teacher put out the word to the families of her chorus inviting them to audition for the chorus of the new album. This time, 35 children were lined up to audition, with their parents enthusiastic about all of the songs, including "Everything Possible." For historical importance, we used the original tracks from 1992 and wedded them with this new generation of singers and families, bridging those twenty-two years with love and awe.

We've witnessed and impacted history. We've brought children and families along for the ride in forty years of making music for, and with, families, along with our under-the-radar career as folk and American roots musicians. Hopefully, we've opened doors for more open discussions in homes, schools, places of worship, clubs and sports teams.

We know that kids who grew up on our music are now bringing their own kids to our shows. Parents who brought their kids are bringing their grandkids. We know that "love makes a family" (another song that Marcy wrote in 1997) and that unconditional love is what every child deserves, and we will never stop singing about that. Nor will we stop dancing in our kitchen with our own diverse families and friends.

Cathy Fink is half of the GRAMMY Award winning duo, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, currently releasing the kickstarter backed CD, "DANCIN' IN THE KITCHEN: songs for ALL families". www.cathymarcy.com

Mostly well done, Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, directed by Sean Gray for the Long Beach Playhouse Mainstage Theatre, recounts the story of Henry (Noah Wagner), a brilliant and celebrated playwright. Successful, highly regarded, he is to the articulation of words and integrity of ideas as another Henry, Henry Higgins, is to proper pronunciation and good grammar. Though he's high-minded, he's not high browed. He prefers pop to classical music. He does believe, though, in the sanctity of words. That's all in his head, though. His real life is a mess.

The story features characters that seek the real thing that is love. This it does through an examination of the affair that Henry conducts with Annie (Loren McJannett-Taylor), an actress married to Max (Sean Hesketh). In a play within a play written by Henry, Max co-stars in a play with Henry's wife Charlotte (Louisa Dienst). Max's character is devastated to learn that Charlotte's character is having an affair. Offering a nice bit of foreshadowing, the scene echoes what later happens to Henry, when he discovers evidence that suggests that his now-wife Annie is having an affair with her colleague Billy (Wilhelm Peters). It also shows poor Max getting cuckolded twice, once on the stage, once in real life.

Henry's an interesting and complex character. Not only does he write plays about the vagaries of love, he enacts them in his offstage life. To his credit, Wagner makes his Henry sincere and believable. His character feels deeply about love's giddiness and despair. Though Henry insists on craft, he also insists on integrity, at least until he has to write for TV. When Annie asks him to ghostwrite the memoir of Brodie (Anthony Nash), a soldier arrested for burning the wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he's as much concerned for the man's motivation as he is for the fact that the guy can't write.

The production's most compelling moments are when the otherwise venerable Henry shows his vulnerable side. When he admits how hard it is to find true love, much less write about it. When Annie betrays him. When Brodie is released from prison and scolds Henry for his TV hackwork. And when he tells Debbie (Amara Phelps), the daughter he had by Charlotte, that her clever words on the obsolescence of monogamy are just that, clever words.

Though the characterizations ring true, the connection between Wagner's Noah and McJannett-Taylor's Annie lacks conviction. Because words are Henry's (and Stoppard's) currency, it's dialogue that makes the play funny, sad, and insightful. Because a couple of the British accents are not a little contrived, scenes are sharp but they aren't scintillating.

There's no final word here on the nature of love. Is it something enduring and romantic? Is more of a business relationship, subject to negotiations? As a provisional solution, the production suggests, as Fats Waller once sang, "if that isn't love, it'll have to do, until the real thing comes along."

Performances are 8pm, Friday and Saturday and 2pm, Sunday. The play runs until March 28. Tickets are $14 - $24. The Playhouse is located at 5021 E. Anaheim Street, Long Beach, CA 90802. For more information call (562) 494-1014, option 1 or visit www.lbplayhouse.org.

Co-authored by Catherine Tedford who directs the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University and writes about street art stickers on her research blog Stickerkitty. On behalf of the NY6 Think Tank.

You might not have observed what is called "street art stickers" before, but once you do, you'll start seeing them everywhere. Measuring around 2x2 to 3x5 inches, and drawn or printed on paper or vinyl, stickers are usually made individually by hand or in small batches through cheap online printing services.

In bigger cities, stickers can be found "hidden in plain sight," slapped up on signposts, light fixtures, and every other imaginable surface of the built environment. On college campuses, stickers cover bulletin boards and bathroom stalls. At home, stickers decorate laptops and skate decks.

In the United States and around the world, stickers are used to advertise the latest streetwear, hip-hop bands, or social media sites. Some artists make stickers to "tag" a space and claim it, at least temporarily, as one's own, though nowadays many American cities have pretty active anti-graffiti laws in place. Stickers also carry socio-political messages that ebb and flow over time and space, depending on who is in office or what issues are playing out in the government or on Wall Street.

But wait. Street art stickers? In a college classroom on Spanish literature and culture?

On a cold autumn afternoon at St. Lawrence University's art gallery in Canton, New York, fourteen undergraduate students sit in a semi-circle on a rug, visiting as part of Professor Marina Llorente's class on Literature, Film and Popular Culture in Contemporary Spain. Some are leaning up against walls, a few others splayed out on beanbag chairs strewn across the floor. They're not here to talk about the current exhibition on display. Rather, everyone is poring over street art stickers from Madrid, Catalonia, Asturias, Galicia, and elsewhere in Spain. Some are new, sent from artists, political organizations, and colleagues who knew about the course project. Other stickers are old, torn, gritty. The students touch them. Smell them. Look at them, realizing they once inhabited a difference space. Everyone is curious to know, to understand, to make sense of messages still infused with the polluted air of a city, the dirt on the walls, the honking of car horns, and the eyes that once glanced at and ingested these messages on the streets of Spain's cities.

Photo by Tara Freeman: Adilson Gonzalez Morales, SLU '16,
with street art stickers from Catalonia.

Why are the students so stuck on the sight of these stickers? Because flashing before their eyes are artistic sound bites of something much larger: political agendas, cultural idiosyncrasies, or economic realities that speak about the Catalonian separatist movement, worker's rights, the environment, gender or sexuality, and other issues. Some stickers shout; others whisper. One from 2003 calls for a General Strike and No a la Guerra or "No to war" in Iraq. In the background, a picture of Picasso's Guernica reminds Spaniards of their country's violent past under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

Reproduced with permission from the St. Lawrence University Art Gallery.

A more recent sticker shows the contemporary Catalan politician Arthur Mas dressed as a dark Gothic Edward Scissorhands with Contra les retallades, Defensem els serveis públics, or "Against the Cuts, Defend Public Services." A third small sticker presents a simple drawing of a crown covered by a red circle with a line through it, the universal No symbol, referencing opposition to the Spanish monarchy.

Students excitedly begin to investigate and synthesize the clues, using their linguistic skills, their visual and textual analytical skills, their background knowledge in the history and politics of the Basque Country or of Catalonia, and their cultural understanding and ability to put messages and ideas into context.

Students unstick these stickers from the walls, cars, and containers to which they previously adhered, and in a different time and place, here in northern New York at this small Liberal Arts college, they begin to listen and learn as the streets begin to talk.

David Ives' is best known for his scintillating Venus in Fur, thought-provoking New Jerusalem and comic gems All In The Timing. But Lives of the Saints revived off-Broadway at The Duke, is a disappointment.

Like Timing, it is a series of one-acts. But the anticipated comedy falls flat and the various subjects, be it friendship, family, nostalgia or odd relationships, never deliver the acclaimed Ives' wit. It's as if this 1999 effort was a first draft he forgot to revise.

That's no fault of the talented cast -- Rick Holmes, Arnie Burton, Carson Elrod, Kelly Hutchinson and Liv Rooth -- who play a variety of roles. They do their best, as does director John Rando, with material that feels, with a few notable exceptions, forced.

For example, "Soap Opera" features Elrod as a repairman in love with his washing machine. All the expected word play and absurd moments are in place, but it doesn't click. Nor does "The Goodness of Your Heart," which makes an interesting comment about the nature of friendship, as two friends argue over a costly TV. "Life Signs" offers the funniest moments, as a dead mother updates her son on her life experiences, much to his consternation.

Two exceptions are the least funny, but the most touching. "It's All Good" posits a man wondering what his life would have been like had he taken a different path. And in a rare moment of fate, he meets his doppelganger. "Lives of the Saints" highlights the ordinary world of two widows who prepare the church lunch following a funeral. Their emotional bond and reflections on a changing world is a high point.

The production itself is stylish, and the theater ideal for an intimate work. But no playwright, however fantastic, can hit the mark every time. Ives' cast gives it their all, but Saints remains earthbound.

So does Elizabeth Swados' The Nomad, though the lead character's desire, the real-life Isabelle Eberhardt, is to soar. Eberhardt (an energetic Teri Madonna) was an adventurous soul who left Switzerland for exotic Algerian Sahara at the turn of the 20th century. Elizabeth Swados, best known for her Broadway hit Runaways, has turned her remarkable story into a musical, with book and lyrics co-written with Erin Courtney.

Now at The Flea, the small theater is suited to the tale of a protean feminist who repudiated Europe, converted to Islam, and led the life of a nomad in colonial Algiers. Dressing as a man and assuming a male identity, Eberhardt called herself Si Mahmoud Essadi. Transgressive and defiant, she challenged social expectations: taking drugs and entered into sexual relationships with abandon.

Her provocative behavior caused controversy on both sides of the cultural divide. Yet the wonder of Eberhardt, who traveled with the secret Sufi brotherhood Qadriya, was her versatility. Fluent in Arabic, she spoke out against the harshness of colonial rule, yet managed to remain somewhat friendly with French officers.

Swados' score is lovely, and her harmonies capture the distinctions of the region's musical elements. So does her seamless direction, which borrows elements of War Horse to suggest the desert world of soldiers and Muslim rebels in French West Africa.

While the ensemble is spot-on, the lyrics are journeyman-like: focused more on narration and less on the interior world of its lead. Still, there are poetic elements in the show, and the 70-minute musical is nicely paced. Eberhardt's story seems larger than life; then again, truth is often stranger than fiction.

The Light Princess at the New Victory Theater, is a fiction that charms. A royal couple asks a vindictive witch for a baby. Their wish is granted with a caveat: The baby won't feel much emotion, and she will defy gravity until her 16th birthday. If she can't attain it by then, it's permanent.

Turns out, only true love will, literally, ground her. But her prince, who prefers song writing to royal duties, gets a few surprises of his own.

The Light Princess is an offbeat, comic fairy tale, thanks to Kristin Wetherington as the witch and Ashley J. Monet as the princess possessed of a lovely voice. Mike Pettry's score works, as does Arthur Oliver's artistic costumes and Julia Noulin-Merat's set design. Puppets by Kathleen Doyle is a pre-show audience winner. Allegra Libonati directs with a flair for the imaginative rather than the technical.

Photo: James Leynse

Have you ever felt ecstatically lucky when you found a coin or a dollar bill? When the supermarket cashier forgot to charge you for an item? Or when you treated yourself to a calorie-laden dessert and didn't gain any weight the next day? Perhaps you aced a dreaded exam or got to your car a few seconds before the meter maid showed up.

Some illicit thrills are better than others. While squeakers often feel like the best kind of triumph, they can also have an insidious effect upon people who forget that winning streaks inevitably grind to a halt. The undeniable exhilaration of getting away with something is bound to evaporate, leaving folks wondering how they ever managed to sustain their luck for so long (or whether they'll ever again experience the intoxicating thrill of briefly riding a rocket to success).

Whether in fact or fiction, a lucky streak can affect people in bizarre ways. For the neurotic, paranoid types, it can increase the sense of imminent danger, the risk of being caught and punished (as well as the enticing possibility of being humiliated in front of one's peers). For others, it can simply stretch the desire to attempt one or two more petty crimes before calling it quits.

Whether one thinks of the chain smoker who lights up another cigarette while boasting that he can stop smoking whenever he wants to -- or the person who insists that "I'm in control of the drugs, the drugs aren't in control of me" -- pride (and often sloppiness) usually goes before a fall.

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Is there is anyone in the Bay area who can milk excessive glee from merely thinking about bad behavior like Josh Kornbluth? A master storyteller who quivers with delight at the mere thought of being caught and punished for trivial pursuits, Kornbluth's hilarious monologues have included Red Diaper Baby, The Mathematics of Change, Love and Taxes, and Andy Warhol: Good For The Jews?

Josh Kornbluth (Photo by: Tue Nam Ton)

Shortly after he moved to San Francisco in 1987, Kornbluth began performing a series of one-man shows (some of which were developed at The Marsh). To help celebrate The Marsh's 25th anniversary, its founder and artistic director, Stephanie Weisman, invited Kornbluth to perform an updated version of one of his most famous shows: Haiku Tunnel.

Although this monologue was expanded into a film in 2001 (which is available on Netflix), Kornbluth has tweaked some of its content to incorporate the challenges faced by an incompetent temp worker at the "S&M Law Firm" who is confronted with today's technology. It's not so much that Kornbluth's character (also named Josh) is incompetent -- it's that the minute Josh's status changes from that of a temp worker to a permanent employee, he can't stop finding ways to sabotage his future. Shakespeare may have suggested that music is the food of love but, in Kornbluth's case, procrastination is the phenomenon which feeds his pixie-like paranoia.

Having written numerous shows perfectly tailored to his dramatic gifts and comic persona as the kind of schlubby Jew who could make Woody Allen seem overly confident, Kornbluth's opening night at The Marsh had the audience rolling with laughter at his misadventures in the dangerous territory encountered when a self loathing schlemiel enters corporate America and thinks he's gotten "a pass." What struck me as even more delightful was the fact that Kornbluth seemed to relish his chance to once more perform Haiku Tunnel as much as Carol Channing would if she could turn back time and hit the road with one more tour of Hello, Dolly!

Josh Kornbluth in Haiku Tunnel
(Photo by: Josh Kornbluth)

For those who live outside the Bay area, I heartily recommend watching the filmed version of Haiku Tunnel and then contrasting it with this video of Kornbluth's live performance (recorded at the San Francisco Public Library on May 28th, 2013 as part of its annual Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor Exhibit). Both versions offer an intimate taste of his strengths as a writer, performer, and anxiety-ridden clown. For those who have worked in highly dysfunctional law offices, Haiku Tunnel is guaranteed to bring back plenty of memories (both good and bad). Enjoy!

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Prior to performing Haiku Tunnel, Josh Kornbluth likes to give his audience a "wink-wink" disclaimer stressing that, even though they may seem totally believable, none of the characters he describes are real. What happens when the frauds of fiction are contrasted with the fraudulent acts of a talented artist? You get a documentary like Beltracchi -- The Art of Forgery, which was screened at the 2015 Berlin and Beyond Film Festival.

Wolfgang Beltracchi at work in his studio

If the goal of a talented painter who can create forgeries of great works is to deceive the experts, credit should also go to writer/director Arne Birkenstock for the deftness and skill with which he entertains, educates, and confuses viewers as he introduces them to Wolfgang Beltracchi and his wife/accomplice, Helene.

Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi with one of his forgeries

Beltracchi's casual approach to art forgery was so laid back that even his children had no idea what he was up to (they just knew that their father liked to paint and didn't seem to work very hard at it). For nearly four decades, Beltracchi succeeded in duping the international art world with forgeries of paintings that people assumed were lost originals by early 20th-century masters.

Wolfgang Beltrcchi with one of his best forgeries

One of the greatest assets in Birkenstock's film is that his protagonist doesn't take art very seriously. Unlike Peter Greenaway's meticulous dissections of great works of art like -- Nightwatching (2007) and Rembrandt's J'Accuse (2008) -- or Teller's forensic film adventure, Tim's Vermeer (2013), Beltracchi -- The Art of Forgery feels much more like a romp and frolic guided by a talented artist who has developed a unique approach to forging and marketing the [supposed] lost work of great artists.

Because the film jumps back and forth in time between archival footage of Beltracchi as a young artist (he claims to have first copied a Picasso painting at the age of 14); the period when he and his wife spent six years in prison serving an open sentence (during which Beltracchi could go to his studio every day to paint); and the artist's second career using his own name, there are segments which [chronologically] can be as confusing as a game of Three Card Monte.

The cleverness of Beltracchi's scheme, the artist's basic affability, and the astonishing ease with which he produces forgeries strong enough to convince auctioneers, collectors, and art historians that his work must actually be paintings which were alluded to (but never found) in the catalogs of such famous artists as Max Ernst, Heinrich Campendonk, Raoul Dufy, and Auguste Herbin transforms Birkenstock's documentary into a delightful chase through the landscape of early 20th century art. Here's the trailer:

To read more of George Heymont go to My Cultural Landscape

Susan Beallor Snyder -- whose work is now on view in the group exhibition "GATHERED" at The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia -- makes ambitious and compelling Manila rope reliefs that represent the culmination of a lifetime of creative impulses. First, as a photographer, then as a goldsmith, Beallor Snyder channeled her creativity into traditional media, but her discovery of the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz provided an "aha" moment that led to her adoption of an unexpected material with spectacular expressive results. Tapping into themes of personal growth and pain, Beallor Snyder has created a body of work that is physically imposing but also deeply lyrical. Having hit her stride as an artist, Susan Beallor Snyder has created a highly individual and remarkably powerful body of work: she stands poised to take her art into new expressive territory.

I recently interviewed Susan and asked her about her personal history and her art.

John Seed Interviews Susan Beallor Snyder

Susan Beallor Snyder: Photo by Jeff Roffman

JS: How and when did you begin making art?

SBS: I was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and began shooting black and white photos while I was a student at the High School of Art and Design in New York. I followed the work of Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White and others, but my favorite photographer at that time and my biggest inspiration was Edward Steichen. I loved how he captured the quality of light in his photographs. In the late '70s I worked as a waitress at Sardi's restaurant and would carry my camera everywhere. I developed my work at night in a closet studio I had set up in my apartment on West End Avenue and 80th Street.

In 1982 I got a job working at ABC News Closeup as assistant to the executive producer, Pamela Hill. It was during my time there that I reconnected with a friend I had met near our summer home in upstate New York. We fell in love and his career took us to Los Angeles, California, in 1987, and we were married a year later in Greenwich, Connecticut. I missed the streets of New York and lost my inspiration to shoot, and I began to study Ansel Adams' Zone method. I set up a darkroom in our house in Woodland Hills. During this time, I worked for the producer Joel Silver; Dawn Steel, who ran Columbia Pictures; and Coline Serreau, a director and writer.

I gave up film production in 1990 to start a family, and it was at that time that I put aside photography because of the harsh chemicals and to focus on my first child, Sara.

JS: How did you become interested in health and diet?

SBS: In 1985 my father was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and my parents decided to follow a macrobiotic diet and lifestyle instead of following the conventional medical path. In order to be supportive of my father's healing, I started to read about their new diet and was so inspired that I completely changed my eating habits. It was about that time that I was starting to have my own health crisis. After Sara was born, I decided to start my own business making gourmet macrobiotic meals in my home and coaching others who wanted to transform their diets to a healthier way of eating.

After living in California for some time we eventually moved to Atlanta, where I continued helping others with healthy food and coaching, and had our second daughter, Madison, in 1995.

All the while my health was in decline. I had terrible chronic fatigue and did what I could to keep up with our busy lifestyles as my husband's career progressed.

Crossroads

JS: When did you restart your art career?

SBS: It was 1999, and we were living in Maryland and moving to New York for a job opportunity for my husband. I had decided that I missed my life as an artist and ordered a 92nd Street Y catalogue to look for art classes. I had studied art there as a child and knew they were well known for their high quality teachers and classes.

I don't paint or draw but I wanted to do something with my hands that was more tactile than photography. I wanted to learn something new. They didn't have woodworking or metalworking classes, but they offered a wide variety of jewelry classes. I didn't wear much jewelry, but I thought I would learn to solder and make table sculptures. I was thrilled to be moving back to New York and to have an opportunity to make art again. I began with the most basic jewelry class, called Absolute Beginners. I was hooked. I took one class after another until I discovered high karat gold and classical goldsmithing. I continued my education at the Jewelry Arts Institute, where they specialize in the ancient methods of classical goldsmithing. I began selling my jewelry through gallery stores around the United States.

Then we moved again, first to Westport, Connecticut, and then back to Atlanta.

Going In Circles

JS: It sounds like all of the moves made it hard for you to keep up your creativity.

SBS: It was difficult, and the moves were disruptive and took a lot of my energy. My oldest got involved in theater, and I began doing some photography again in connection with that. I was making some jewelry too, but then the price of gold went through the roof. Still, I needed an outlet and was feeling the urge to make and exhibit something. Nobody wanted to exhibit jewelry, so I thought about exhibiting my photography.

A photographer friend and mentor, Jerry Siegel, kept encouraging me to shoot outside of theater to build a body of work, but as a New York street photographer I wasn't inspired by the streets of Atlanta. One day I realized that I had a body of work in the form of the 20-year-old negatives in my garage.

A curator friend, Hope Cohn, put some of my photos in a show, and that was the beginning of a new stage for me.

JS: How did you become involved with making rope pieces?

SBS: After the show and exhibiting my old photographs, I decided I wanted to work larger and became interested in sculpture. I took a few classes at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) for professional development, and a professor there introduced me to the work of artist Magdalena Abakanowicz. I was inspired by an article in the New York Times that talked about her Abakans series that she began in her small one room apartment in Warsaw in the late '50s. She used fiber because she could fold them up and put them under her bed. I was drawn to the large scale as well as her ability to express emotion; the fiber was rough and stiff and she was able to make a statement about the world around her.

Inner Struggle

JS: What are some of the themes and ideas that your works express?

SBS: The first piece I did with manila rope is called Inner Struggle.

This piece represents my desire to express the frustrations I felt in my corporate wife and mother role. By this time, 2011, I had spent years raising the kids, moving for my husband's work, and playing the role of corporate wife--all things I chose and wanted to do, but I felt that I was losing myself as an artist, woman and individual. I wanted to find more time for me. I wanted to create artwork that would represent those emotions. I felt that the natural manila rope that I had discovered and used for this first piece was the perfect material. It was rough and held together yet was also pliable and possible to manipulate. The forms I create with rope are able to express pain and angst while also presenting themselves as beautiful, flowing forms.

My second rope piece was Expectations. It includes patina copper "eyes" that say something about all the people in my life watching and judging and about the obligations and expectations I felt. I have come to realize that in some way these expectations were self-imposed. I could easily have created a life for myself where my art would be the top priority, but I chose to give that up in order to be married to my husband and be involved in my children's lives. This rope sculpture expresses my personal feelings, but is also meant to connect with others who have felt similar struggles between the needs of others and their own expressive needs.

Expectations

JS: Tell me about your working methods.

SBS: This work is physically challenging. The rope gets into my fingers, and the pain of creating these pieces is similar to the pain and emotion that many of them represent. I create them on the floor and loom over them on a tall ladder as they develop. There is a lot of repetitive motion, and that is where my thoughts can wander and the work becomes an extension of my mind and emotions. The work speaks to me. It is intuitive and spontaneous. I sometimes feel like Jackson Pollock with rope. The work evolves as I create. There are no sketched studies before I begin. I usually have a shape and size in mind and then I begin. There have been times when I have worked for days only to realize that the piece is not working and I have to pull it all apart and begin again. I look at them from above to get a sense of the whole piece, but it isn't until they are hung that they really show themselves.

JS: What have you learned about yourself and your creative drive by making these rope pieces?

SBS: In making my first works in this medium, I often found myself angry and frustrated, and those titles reflected that. However, one day I noticed I was feeling peaceful and happy, and the title Women's Work came to me. It wasn't all about me. It was about all the women of the world who are the caretakers of the world. Women have been using fibers since ancient times, and I realized that my work was not only about me but that everyone--man, woman, and child--could relate to my work as I titled it and find their own story in any of the pieces I create.

GATHERED: Georgia Artists Selecting Georgia Artists
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia
Exhibition dates: February 28 - April 11, 2015
75 Bennett Street, Suite A2
Atlanta, GA 30309

My favorite memory of my 30-year arts management career was attending a performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Opelika, Alabama, in the early 1990s. I was the Executive Director of the organization at the time, and we were working feverishly to escape a difficult period of financial instability. My staff and I were struggling to find a way to pay off old debts and support the vision of Judith Jamison, our Artistic Director. Ailey did not have the same fund-raising prowess it does today; money was extremely tight, and it was scary.

Every so often I was able to escape from New York and watch the company perform on tour. Seeing so many audience members excited by the work of the dancers -- from Tokyo to Paris to Chicago -- was always encouraging and inspired us to continue working to save the company.

On a tour of southern cities, we had a one-night stand in Opelika, Alabama. I am sure the date was booked to fill a gap in the touring calendar; the fee must have been very modest. The company performed in a simple high school auditorium, about as far from the Palais Garnier in Paris as one could imagine. I imagine my dancers had the same feeling I did -- let's do this show and move to a more glamorous venue.

But then the performance began. And a remarkably diverse audience fell under the Ailey spell. By the end of Revelations, the entire community was cheering as one and demanding an encore.

The most notable moment came after the show when the entire audience, and all of the dancers, found their way across the street to the local Denny's for pie and ice cream. There was an astonishing spirit in the place. Black and white people were eating and laughing and joking together. The work of the dancers had inspired everyone and, at least for an hour, racial divides seemed to have evaporated (as had this arts manager's prejudice about racial relations in the American South).

I have always remembered that night that reinforced why the arts are so incredibly potent and important.

And over this past year, with so much racial tension once again enveloping our nation, I think of that single Ailey performance in Opelika even more often.

The arts can and must play a role in uniting people. In educating people. In inspiring people.

This is why so much of the work of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland is devoted to arts institutions of color.

These institutions are threatened today. African American and Latino and Asian American and Native American arts institutions are less financially stable than they have been in a long time; their traditional funders, especially government agencies and foundations, are simply not supporting their work as they did in the past. Many are simply going away. And yet the need for the work they do and their leadership roles in our communities has never been greater.

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Paul Taylor Dance Company in "Esplanade." Photo by Paul B. Goode.

What is the life of a painting? In an artist's hands, a previously anonymous canvas and a random assortment of paint suddenly becomes not only an expression of an idea, but a commodity that often lives beyond the artist himself. The work can be sold, displayed, auctioned, loaned, perhaps stolen, then perhaps recovered, re-sold, and so on -- almost indefinitely.

What is the life of a dance? A choreographer makes a work on a human body, sometimes a group of performers. At the perfect intersection of lights, costumes, and audience, the dance becomes a performance. When the show is over, the audience goes home, the dancers dissipate into the night, and the work of art is gone, existing only in the moment.

Therein lies the challenge every dance maker must eventually face: what happens to my work when I die?

Paul Taylor in rehearsal. Photo by Whitney Browne.

I was invited to a rehearsal with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, still led 60 years later by Taylor himself, as they expand as Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance, a larger presenting umbrella organization for modern dance. At 83, Taylor still makes two dances a year, in addition to reviving some of his 142 works for their upcoming Lincoln Center season March 11 -- 29. Watching this last living member of the second generation of American modern dance makers, I was struck by the sheer amount of information that he has collected in his body throughout his lifetime. A dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, Taylor was also invited by George Balanchine as a guest artist with the New York City Ballet, continuing to make dances for his own Paul Taylor Dance Company that seek to be reflective of the times. In an attempt to secure his body of work while recognizing the contributions of his artistic colleagues, Paul Taylor has begun the very public process of ensuring that his work, his style and the dance world that he has known and loved has a sustainable plan for the future.

Paul Taylor in George Balanchine's "Episodes." Photo by Zachary Freyman.

I had the unique opportunity to speak with both Jon Tomlinson, Taylor's Executive Director, and current dancer Laura Halzack, to better understand the impact of this new step towards institutional sustainability for American modern dance from both the artistic and business perspective. Their words reflect the great care towards ensuring Taylor's vision for the future of his work, while candidly revealing the human limits of this ephemeral art.

Paul Taylor's "Big Bertha." Photo by Jack Mitchell.

Embracing the Balanchine model

"Paul Taylor is the most pragmatic man I have ever met; it's all about making it work," Tomlinson says. "Paul Taylor looked at the industry around us to see who has succeeded and who has failed at creating an institution. The person that has clearly succeeded the most is George Balanchine. He left New York City Ballet with a guide and a future vision for the next generation. Paul and I had a very blunt conversation, and he presented to me a plan and an artistic vision of how he would like his work to go forward. I said, 'If we wait until you die to do this, we will spend a huge amount of our energy dismissing the nay-sayers. If you do this while you are alive, no one gets to say this is not what he wants.' All the energy of the institution, the staff, the dancers, the board, we get to embrace this vision and make sure that it's a success. We think we are embracing the Balanchine model: tonight you could go uptown to New York City Ballet and see mostly Balanchine, but then also a couple of other choreographers. The company's core is the Balanchine repertoire, which is probably the most magnificent ballet repertory gathered in one place, and then a bunch of other stuff that builds on that to say: this is what ballet can be. We want to do the same thing with Paul Taylor; we have a repertory of modern dance that is second to none, we think that is a strong core to go forward with and build upon."

Paul Taylor's "Arden Court." Courtesy of Paul Taylor Dance Company.

"We have a very strong partnership with New York City Ballet, and in particular with Peter Martins, who has been incredibly supportive of this process. Peter is a huge supporter of modern dance, and he even admits it: 'I'm a ballet man! Why do I care about modern dance? But I do! I worry about all of the great artists in my lifetime vanishing and dying, the artform is going to die along with it.' Peter met Paul very early on in the conversation, he asked Paul a lot of very specific questions like, Would you be okay with the spotlight going off of you and going onto dance? It's going from Paul Taylor to Modern Dance, are you going to be okay with that? Paul said absolutely. Paul is very funny, he has always said that he hates the spotlight. He just likes to make his dances and be left alone."

Paul Taylor's "Company B." Photo by Paul B. Goode.

"The idea at Lincoln Center is that New York City Ballet finally has the dance theater they always wanted. The vision can include multiple seasons of American ballet and modern dance, invited companies, and full festival programming. Peter Martins has that mapped out, and he wants it to become the greatest dance theater in America and one of the great dance theaters of the world. That's his singular vision, and I think that will be his legacy. We have contracts with the Koch Theater for the next six years, and deal memos for the next ten years. Our goal is to make modern dance the last great art form that Lincoln Center recognizes."

Mr. Taylor plans to leave his works to the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation, ensuring that future seasons of Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance will include a core Taylor repertory. Each season will be supplemented with new contemporary commissions, revivals of orphaned masterworks (Tomlinson hinted at the potential future acquisition of some Cunningham repertory) and works by other modern dance masters, as well as shared programming with other modern dance institutions.

Embracing Taylor's Humanity

"With Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance, we are representing the past, present, and future of modern dance," says Taylor Dancer Laura Halzack, currently in her ninth season with the company. "We are still Paul Taylor's dance company. When we go on the road, we are the Paul Taylor Dance Company. But when we perform in New York, Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance is the initiative. The company is still the focus of it, but it is meant to be shared. This year, we have the Limon company doing Doris Humphrey's great work 'Passacaglia' and we also have Shen Wei's 'Rite of Spring.' It gives modern and contemporary dance a much larger platform -- not just for our company -- it's a way to present the entire art form to a larger audience. It's inspiring that Paul wants the past to be preserved, but its also inspiring and thrilling that he is also thinking towards the future of the art form and the company. It gives us a lot of confidence to be dancers here. There's a super positive charge around, and it's awesome to know that your boss really behind it."

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Laura Halzack in Paul Taylor's "Beloved Renegade." Photo by Paul B. Goode.

"There are a lot of things that haven't changed, but things are evolving. This year is presenting the greatest change for the company in a long time. You see a lot of dancers come and go, you work with such mature artists when you first start out and you are learning from them, and then it's almost like you wake up one morning, and there's that kid tapping you on the shoulder, and now you're that person who is the purveyor of information. It's still such an oral tradition here. We have our videos and we obviously have Paul and Bettie [de Jong, Taylor's rehearsal director and right arm for the past 35 years] giving us notes. We all give information to one another."

"When I started with the company, I was so focused on learning the shapes. I was so fortunate to have Paul create on me very early on in my career. What he honed in on me was something that was very personal, an essence, and he helped me be able to share that essence with other people. He will give you the challenge, and then step back and let you find it. A lot of times no news is good news. He likes to see you blossom."

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Paul Taylor's "Piazzolla Caldera." Photo by Paul B. Goode.

"I want people to remember the humanity of Paul's work. As an essence, each dance has its own life, certain dances have their own vocabulary. But there is something essentially human about all of his works, and essentially individual. That's one of the greatest things about being one of his dancers. The further into the future when work gets away from a choreographer, it's my hope to share that sense of humanity. If things get too codified, the work can lose its life, and that's easy to do without someone at the helm. It can become too technical, but Paul always said, my work isn't a technique, my work is a style. He's always allowed each individual dancer to inhabit his style in the way that their bodies inhabit it. That's what makes his work so beautiful. You wouldn't have the same effect with a piece like "Esplanade" without all of the different personalities. The spatial patterns are amazing, but what he does is encourage dancers to be themselves. That is part of the success of his works and what I want to pass on."

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Paul Taylor's "Troilus and Cressida (reduced)." Photo by Paul B. Goode.

A rare woman is very difficult to describe-therefore I prefer to do an interview of Liana Yaroslavsky.

I met Liana several years ago in Paris and now she is planning to come and work in the U.S, designing furniture and decorating homes. Liana is an incredible and undeniably elegant woman. She has a tall physique, beautiful face, generous smile, and intelligent eyes. Her sense of style is considered "high fashion", yet she has an understated sophistication and grace that I feel comes with her colorful background. She usually wears her hair short and sleeked back. She wears haute couture and ready to wear collections right of the runway. She walks into a party like a noble aristocrat. She is on the guest lists at the most premiere fashion and social circles. She is a global woman of fine taste and character. She is a mother, an incredible artist and an interior decorator.

Liana's coffee tables are thought-provoking. Her designs are so original that the person with the most esteemed tastes would want to have her artful furniture in their homes. Each piece is more like a gallery art piece. Her life would actually make for an incredible Hollywood script. She is anything but ordinary. She is unforgettable and distingué.

What is your design and school background, do you think it helped your creativity or was that innate?
I went to Parsons School of Design in NY, graduated as a graphic designer and worked in that field for 13 years. Parsons was an amazing experience. NY at the end of the '80s was inspiring but I came with my "baggage" from Communist Russia and then Israeli army. Different cultures intertwined helps to have a different perspective. Later I changed to interior decoration and furniture design. It just came naturally and I have been designing for the last 25 years...

How did you grow into being an avant garde designer?
I just don't like anything ordinary- I want to push the boundaries and create things that are surprising with an historical reference.

I've been following Russian designers over the past few years, and they are ferociously taking over the art and fashion industries, Russians have an amazing sense of style and skill in design, why do you think that is?
Rich history and repression, is a great base for art and creativity to blossom.

Do you meet your new clients in social atmospheres or do they find you after having seen your work at galleries?
Mostly I design for clients that have seen or read about my work. I don't like to talk about my work at dinner parties, I much prefer to hear about others since I know all about myself already...

How do you think Paris style differs from LA? in NY there's a distinct aesthetic in furniture fashion- how do they differ in terms of the weather and culture in terms of designing?
LA is less formal, it is more about the outdoors and a relaxed atmosphere. Paris is focused more on history and formality. NY is more about the grunge.

Your coffee tables are magnificent, how was that unique design concept born?
The concept was born from designing a coffee table for myself. I couldn't find one so I designed it, after seeing the result and quite amazing reviews, I was inspired to design a collection The inspiration of the collection came from different fields; history, movies, music and found objects. I gave liberty to my imagination without thinking about the technical aspects. I derived from the idea- that there is always a way how to construct and make them- the idea came first, then the technical struggle, after. Some of the pieces I sketched first, then found a way to make them. Those are the limited edition series. For the one off pieces, I acquired objects from different times in history, deconstructed, reconstructed and associated them to other objects. It's like making an installation or conducting an orchestra. The result was surprising... an old object associated with a new way of presenting it radiated a unique energy and a new story.

Do you have any favorites among your designs?
I don't have favorites. All my creations are unique to me, each came from a different inspiration. You know, between the sketch, the concept, the technical struggle then when eventually the piece is born into real life. It is surprising and very emotional process, the result is not always what I expected, but I always found it to be better in real than on paper. It's like having a baby-you fall in love with it when it comes into the world. I cannot have favorites. Even though there is a margin of error and imperfection since everything is done by hand, I think it adds to the charm.

Your status as a sought after designer became a lot more evident after which recent showing? why do you think?
I think it is a combination of various publications, shows and awards but mostly it is a style that is unique. The show in Pratt Gallery in NY was very important but also the one in the Meurice hotel in Paris, where they actually kept my creations for a whole year since they felt it melted into their environment perfectly.

Why are you drawn to LA? and where is your favorite places to go? On that same note, where would you compare it to (or not) in your favorite places of Paris?
LA is a happy and sunny place, people work hard but they don't seem so stressed as in NY or upset as in Paris. My favorite place in LA is the Beverly Hills Hotel. I find it to be a perfection; the pink, the banana leaves, the hollywood glamour and the martinis. I cannot compare it to Paris and it is a good thing since it's unique. My favorite restaurant in Paris is Caviar Kaspia with its Russian food and French atmosphere facing the Madelaine church.

What is in store here in the future for you here in terms of commissioned work?
I am represented in LA by Twentieth Gallery which I think is the perfect place for me and it helps that I love their selection of designers and artists. It is quite an amazing place!

What do you look for in a man?
Oh it's simple, I want him to be intelligent, generous, affectionate, successful, confident, funny, tall and know which wine to choose.

Can you tell us about some of your upcoming projects?
Unfortunately I cannot mention any yet but there are quite few in perspective with central, monumental pieces and interior decoration. I will have to spend a lot of time in the U.S. for that and produce them locally, it is very exciting, new and challenging working with new vendors away from my comfort zone.

You have such presence when you walk into a party! Are you are aware of that, did it help that you were a model?
I was a model ages ago but I do not think it has anything to do with the way I walk into a party and no, I am not aware of my presence, maybe that's the key - not trying too hard.

You're great friends with several fashion designers that I admire...how do they differ from interior designers?
They don't but they are more under pressure since they have to produce at least 2 collections per year.

What is your beauty regimen?
Chardonnay.

What is your guilty pleasure?
Dark chocolate.

Where is your favorite place to travel for relaxation? inspiration? for fun?
Maldives for relaxation, Venice for inspiration and NY for fun.

I know so many people in LA that want you to design for them, how do you plan to work with them when you go back to Paris?

I don't plan to go to Paris, at least not for long. I have so many work opportunities here that this is the new place to be. LA become quite a center for art and design and it is still growing. I would like to be in a place that is developing. When there is a space art fills it up and LA is one. Seriously, I do have quite few upcoming projects in the U.S., I do feel that I can bring a new and fresh perspective and this is not saying that there are no great designers here because there are plenty.

What is your perfect morning? evening?
Sunny morning with coffee and Huffington Post and evenings spent with friends around a great meal that I didn't cook.

If you moved to LA, where would be the ideal location you'd like to live?
I really like West Hollywood. It has the privacy, nature and social life at the same time. Coming from Paris, I need something that resembles a center.

Could you describe to me your character in five words?
Spontaneous, creative-insecure (comes as a package), funny (my kids don't think so), passionate and curious.

What is important to you in a friendship? relationship?
Loyalty, laughs, open mind and love. Not very original.

Maure de Venise
limited edition of 12
Crystal Murano chandelier (by Archimede Seguso), black mirror, plexiglass, steel.
Dimensions: 1100 x1100 x 460 mm

L'O
limited edition of 12
Murano blown glass upon a Versailles parquet floor dotted with LED lights, plexiglass,
steel.
Dimensions : 1036 x 1036 x 475 mm

O2 Variations side table
Balls of Murano blown glass float above a one way mirror dotted with LED lights,
plexiglass, steel.
Dimensions: 400 x 450 mm

La Luna coffee table
Murano glass blown sphere with « pullegoso » effect, mirrored on the Inside
Dimensions : 1100 x 1100 x 330 mm

You can find more on Liana's original designs at www.lianayar.com and her pieces are also shown in LA at Twentieth, 7470 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90036 (323) 904-1200

Julian Gargiulo may be a classical pianist entrepreneur but he has the hair of a rock star. He likes to joke about this on stage. He says, "When I was a child I wanted to learn how to play the guitar but my parents gave me piano lessons instead. My hair never stopped dreaming."

It's with this same kind of lightness that he approaches the piano bench. His curly, rebellious and untamed hair plays its own part in this unusual pianist's performances. Though he's not likely to burn any of the Steinway pianos he performs on, in Jimi Hendrix-like fashion (after all, he was recently named a Steinway Artist), you never walk into a Julian Gargiulo performance knowing exactly what to expect.

I had the pleasure to produce his Carnegie Hall concerts from 2006 to 2007, and have since followed his career as a patron of the arts. The entrepreneurial spirit and endeavors shines through his charm and presentation. If you had to describe Julian, it might be a tough choice between a charismatic virtuoso who can deliver a joke, or a sarcastic storyteller who works the crowd humorously. Depending on how you look at it, both definitions are accurate for this piano entrepreneur slowly building an audience globally and producing music that is still sold via CDs.

His schooling is hardly a joking matter, having attended (and survived!) the prestigious Moscow Conservatory in Russia and the Peabody Conservatory in United States. Between exclusive performances for the President of Singapore, innovative concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York, and his own Water Island Music Festival of Classical and Jazz Music in Virgin Islands, Julian Gargiulo gets around a lot! In a state of semi-permanent jet-lag, he may not know exactly what time it is back home in Paris (where he's been based with his wife and daughter for the past two years) but he never fails to be in time with his audience.

We caught up with him over the phone from the Caribbean island of Antigua.

David: Why do you do what you do?
Julian: I can't help it. I want people to leave my performances smiling. Forget their troubles. Forget their worries. Forget the stock market. I always tell them "music is the best investment" and then point them in the direction of the CD table.
David: You just played at Carnegie Hall. What's your favorite audience?
Julian: The last one I've played for. And it's not only because I have a bad memory. What was the question again?
David: Are you ever serious or is it part of your brand?
Julian: I find people are often concerned with that, or at least with that word. I am very serious...about having fun.

So what should you expect if Julian performs at a theater near you? He might greet you as you're entering the concert hall with "they were a little short on ushers tonight" as he prefers to make his entrance by leaping up onto the stage from the audience side. If you're not careful, he might bring you up on stage as well, to play pantomime with a little Chopin. Then break for a Question & Answer "but I'll be asking the questions."

Simply put, expect to revise any preconceived notions you have about classical music concerts. He will entertain. Do not expect to sit still. Do not expect to look at the program. Do not expect to be spared just because you sat in the back row. Do expect to learn things you never knew, about the lives of the composers, Julian's two-year-old daughter's sleeping patterns, or the latest in airport security trends. "They've even started patting down my hair. And they usually find something."

Definitely, expect to listen to classical masterpieces, delivered with genuine emotion and incredible precision. In short, expect to develop a mini-crush on the guy! All in all, his greatest talent might simply be his unbelievable likeableness! Humble before the classical composers he plays, he manages to reach out and strike a chord in each and every person listening to him. In the end, they will all probably get up and give him a standing ovation. I did.

Julian is currently on tour in the US. For the rest of the year his program includes concerts in the Caribbean, Asia, and Australia. He has a never ending entrepreneurial quest to build his entrepreneurial career as a pianist. If you do find yourself at a Gargiulo concert, don't forget to buy his "Roll over Beethoven" CD, with his own compositions including "The Lost Sonata for Piano and Trumpet: I. Moderato intenso, II. Scherzo, III. Andante and IV. Finale." For more information, visit www.juliangargiulo.com

Carlos Núñez band (Carlos Núñez, Pancho Álvarez, Stephanie Cadman, and Xurxo Núñez) in concert at the Library of Congress, August 19, 2014. Photo by Valda Morris for the American Folklife Center. The photo is a work of the U.S. government, and is in the public domain.

I'm happy to share with you a special concert, which took place on August 19, 2014 in the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium. In the show, which was captured in the video embedded below, Carlos Núñez, one of the leading figures in the Spanish folk music of Galicia, played a set of material collected by Alan Lomax in Galicia in 1952. Núñez is a world-famous traditional bagpiper as well as a classically-trained flute and recorder virtuoso. He has played with the Chieftains, Ry Cooder, Altan, Sinead O'Connor, Hector Zazou, Philip Pickett, and Tamiya Terashima, to name only a few. He has also performed with symphony orchestras and classical ensembles, and has appeared on prestigious stages the world over. But he considers his music, first and foremost, part of the overall category of "Celtic music," like the folk music of Ireland, Brittany, Scotland, and Wales.

Carlos is on tour in the U.S. right now--see if you can catch him in concert! I'm particularly happy to say he'll be appearing at the Strathmore Music Center outside Washington, D.C., on St. Patrick's Day, and my band Ocean will join him for a few tunes.

So who was Alan Lomax? He was probably the most important folk music collector of the twentieth century. For a decade in the 1930s and 1940s, he worked for the Library of Congress, in the archive where I serve as editor, which is now part of the Library's American Folklife Center (AFC). For the rest of his life until the 1990s, he collected for radio stations, record companies, and his own private foundation. In 2004, the Library of Congress acquired all of that material as well, so that the entirety of Lomax's collection is in one place. Lomax has had an incalculable effect on popular music, recording the first songs by Muddy Waters, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Texas Gladden, and Honeyboy Edwards, to name a few. He also did some of the first field recordings of European folk music to be released to the public, including material from Ireland, Britain, Italy, and Spain. His field recordings were transcribed for books, released on records, and learned by a wide range of artists from Johnny Cash to Led Zeppelin and from Aaron Copland to Beausoleil. To celebrate the centennial, we're running a year-long series of events, which you can read about here.

Alan Lomax recording at the Palma Festival, Mallorca, Spain, June 1952. American Folklife Center Alan Lomax Collection. Used by Permission.

A researcher as well as musician, Carlos Núñez has visited the American Folklife Center's reading room at the Library of Congress several times in the past few years, researching Lomax's Galician field trip. He has not only heard the recordings, but read Lomax's field notes and correspondence, digging out all the information he could about the first extensive field collection from his home region. This research enabled him to add readings from Lomax's notes to the concert program, and he honored me and Alberto Avendaño with the task of reading Lomax's words.

Lomax, who lived in Europe for most of the 1950s because he had been blacklisted at home, loved Galician music, and shared Carlos's belief that Galicia was essentially Celtic, which greatly colored his fieldwork. His notes are full of connections between Galicia, Ireland and Scotland, starting with the landscape...:

"Our first trip was down the road towards Vigo. The countryside had that same fey look I had seen only in Southern Ireland, although there was really no resemblance in the shape of the hills or the vegetation; but somehow here, too, one could see strange creatures living in the bright green hedgerows..."

...and continuing to connections between their music:

"It is always the same with the Celts, whether in Galicia or Galway; there is the hostility, the complexity, the thousand reservations, the distrust of strangers, the duplicity even, and then the music begins... They are suddenly lifted up and they sail away, airborn, the strange Celts whose tunes are so close to bird song."

Alberto Avendaño (l.) and Carlos Núñez discover something new in Lomax's Galician field notes on August 7, 2013. Avendaño, once Núñez's English teacher in Spain, is now the Spanish-language editor for the Washington Post. Photo by Stephen Winick for the American Folklife Center. The photo is a work of the U.S. government, and is in the public domain.

These romantic connections between Spain and the Celtic countries are frowned upon by many Celtic and Iberian scholars today: after all, Galicia didn't have a Celtic language any more recently than France, Switzerland, or the Czech Republic, and we don't call those places "Celtic" anymore. However, there's a trend in scholarship that is increasingly supporting Lomax's and Núñez's conviction, a recognition that the cultures of the Atlantic fringe of Europe, including coastal Spain and the modern Celtic countries, have been deeply connected through commerce and colloquy since ancient times. More and more modern archaeologists and historians are embracing this view of an interconnected Atlantic culture that went back to ancient times and survives to some extent today. Recent archaeological and linguistic studies suggest that the Celtic peoples spread to Ireland, France, and Britain from a starting point in Spain, not from the east as has generally been thought. All of this makes the idea of "Celtic Galicia," or at least of an overarching culture that includes both the Celtic cultures and Galicia, more viable now than ever. (See the note after the video for references.)

Carlos studies this history, and follows these theories closely. He mentioned them onstage and in an oral history interview conducted after the concert. He also pointed out that bagpipes appear in the historical records of Britain just slightly after they appear in church carvings in Atlantic Spain, near the turn of the 14th century, suggesting to some people that the bagpipe, too, may have arrived in the Celtic countries via Spain. So independently of whether either style of music can be called "Celtic," Carlos believes, as Alan Lomax did before him, that there's a direct connection between Galician music and that of Ireland and Scotland.

José Maria Rodriguez playing his panpipes, November 27, 1952. American Folklife Center Alan Lomax Collection. Used by Permission.

In the modern world, there are other connections to be made with Lomax's Galician field tapes. Some of these recordings were featured in the Spain volume of the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, the first anthology of world music in high-fidelity sound, which came out in 1955. One of the tracks on that album was a set of tunes played on a chifro, an eight-hole panpipe carved from a single piece of wood with a handle shaped like a horse's head. The musician was José Maria Rodriguez, an itinerant farm laborer, knife grinder, and capador (pig castrator) who announced his arrival in town with an alborada, or "dawn song." The recording made its way to the ears of Gil Evans and Miles Davis, who used the alborada as the theme "The Pan Piper" on Davis's classic album Sketches of Spain. You can hear Carlos play the tune on the ocarina in the concert embedded below, hear the original pan piper at the site of the Association for Cultural Equity, and hear Davis's version on YouTube.

That's more than enough introduction to this concert, except to point out that it also features Dr. Judith Cohen, a Canadian ethnomusicologist and singer who specializes in Spanish traditional music. Judith is the world's foremost academic expert on Lomax's Spanish field trip, having followed in his footsteps and visited many of his surviving informants. She is also a performer capable of bringing the songs to life. She has known Carlos since he was a teenager, and was the perfect presenter and singer to invite to join him onstage. In addition, the band is joined on two songs by AFC folklife specialist (and Ocean bandleader) Jennifer Cutting on accordion, and by me on vocals.

Without further comment, then, here is The Carlos Núñez band performing music from the Alan Lomax collection, featuring Carlos Núñez, Pancho Álvarez, Stephanie Cadman, and Xurxo Núñez, and guests Alberto Avendaño, Judith Cohen, Jennifer Cutting, and Stephen Winick:

Note: For examples of recent scholarship supporting a Galician-Celtic connection, see: Facing the ocean: the Atlantic and its peoples, 8000 BC-AD 1500 by Barry Cunliffe (2001); The Atlantic Iron Age: settlement and identity in the first millennium BC by Jon C. Henderson (2007); Tartessian: Celtic in the South-west at the dawn of history (2009) and Tartessian 2: The inscription of Mesas do Castelinho ro and the verbal complex preliminaries to historical phonology (2011), by John T. Koch.; Celtic from the West: alternative perspectives from archaeology, genetics, language, and literature edited by Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch; and Celtic from the West 2: rethinking the Bronze Age and the arrival of Indo-European in Atlantic Europe edited by John T. Koch and Barry Cunliffe (2013).

Who knew art could be so delicious?

When it comes to tattoos, no piece is "just OK." They are either mind-blowing works of art, or they are the worst thing you have ever seen. Tattoos are a way to permanently display your passion, and for those who love the culinary arts, a tattoo of a favorite food is just the way to express it. If you happen to be considering getting a tattoo that displays your love of food, get inspired by these delicious-looking and beautiful tattoos.

Click Here to see the 13 Food Tattoos You'll Want to Steal

- Lauren Gordon, The Daily Meal

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I am not a film critic, not by any stretch of the imagination. Nor am I an expert on BDSM. Although after seeing Fifty Shades of Grey, I kinda want to be...

And I haven't read the book, so any comparisons, for better or worse, are lost on me. Sorry, but any book review that starts with "The writing was awful but..." not only turns me off, it pisses me off. We writers work WAY too hard to get published.

True, it wasn't the greatest movie I've ever seen -- no Oscar buzz for this one, I'm afraid. But honestly, you could say that about most beloved movies. I don't remember Wedding Crashers threatening an Academy Awards appearance, but I love that movie. "Make me a bicycle, clown!" Still makes me laugh. Every time.

And whether you liked the sex scenes or felt cheated by the build up, it's gotten people talking and thinking about sex in unconventional ways. Which, as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing. Anything that happens between two consenting adults is between those two adults. We need more sex, love and passion in the world -- and less judgment about it.

Truthfully, I thought the story was intriguing and the sex scenes were hot. I only wish I'd seen it with a date instead of the room full of giddy, slightly tipsy middle-aged women who rented out the theater for a private showing. That seemed a bit counterintuitive to me, knowing as I did only the film's subject matter.

"When should I show up?" joked a single guy I know.

"If you're smart, you and about 50 of your friends should be there when it's over," I suggested.

But what I loved the most about the movie was Dakota Johnson's Anastasia. She kicked ass.

She may have been the "sub" to Christian's "dom," but there was no doubt that Anastasia (Ana) was running the show from the moment Christian set eyes on her.

Even though her mutual attraction to him was apparent, she didn't turn into a weak, sit-by-the-phone-and-hope-he-calls kind of girl. She lived her life and let him pursue her, which is so rare in today's Hollywood movies and "Bachelor"-chasing reality television.

Public service announcement: Please stop watching that drivel. A house full of women competing for one man's attention has seriously set us back to the Victorian age. It's embarrassing. Find a better guilty pleasure.

As young and innocent as Ana was, she also had some pretty healthy boundaries:

She owned her feelings and her body.

She never allowed anything that made her feel 'less than.'

She made him earn her -- on her terms.

And, the moment she felt mistreated, she walked away.

Bravo.

As far as I'm concerned, we need more role models like Ana for our daughters and nieces to emulate. And fewer damsels in distress.

As a single woman who writes about dating and sex, I talk to a lot of men about their thoughts and methods of dating. And as different as they all are (young, divorced, widowed), they all have one thing in common: They are all totally confused about what women want.

"I'd love to take you out sometime," said Ken, a romantic and handsome widower I recently met. "So... why don't you think about it and get back to me, let me know when you're free..." he asked.

I sighed, and was immediately turned off.

"Please don't do that," I said. "I know you know better. If you want to see me, pick a day and ask me out. If I'm busy or not interested, I'll let you know. But don't put that ball in my court."

"Thank you, so much!" his response surprised me. "I've been trying to adjust to today's dating game, and I never know what to do," he admitted.

How sad is that? Here is a perfect gentleman, who is quite the catch for the right woman, and he is doubting himself as a man because of the mixed messages in today's media and society.

As disappointed as I was, I wasn't surprised. I fell in love with the now-defunct Showtime series "Sleeper Cell" last year, and have slowly been rationing the last few DVDs. Michael Ealy is seriously one of the most underrated actors out there. But I was kinda shocked by the two female love interests in the first season. Both made all of the first moves, and coerced their soon-to-be boyfriends into sex and a relationship. Which really made me think: Is it possible that Hollywood has ruined dating? Think about it for a second. If every modern movie and TV show out there shows aggressive women taking all the risks and boldly doing the asking out, my smiling at a guy I find attractive across the bar will no longer be enough. Unless I approach him, stuff my number in his crotch and suggest a night he'll never forget, he doesn't think I'm interested. And that's really sad. Because I am.

Most of my single girlfriends feel the same as I do: They want to be pursued. Not that we CAN'T be in charge; we just don't want to be. We do it all day long, with our careers and kids. We want, we NEED, to be "the girl" in our romantic life. And yes, some of us (the strongest of us, probably) love the idea of being dominated. Not hurt, but taken by someone we desire.

The sexual revolution wasn't intended to reverse the roles men and women play, or to make women be more like men. It was intended to give us more options. To allow us to work, stay home, and have sex if and when we want to.

"This is the emotional journey of someone who doesn't seem as strong as she becomes."
~ "Fifty Shades of Grey" Director, Sam Taylor Johnson
Time Magazine "The Grey Area"

It takes a truly strong woman to let go, on her terms. And that's exactly what Anastasia does. But regardless of their contract (which she edits and never signs), Ana is still the one in control. And not just in the 'stripper in a club' way. When she's bothered that Christian won't sleep in the same bed with her, she questions it. When he texts her that he is on his way to meet a woman from his past, she pulls back and doesn't answer his phone call. Yes, it's still Hollywood, and a bit unrealistic that a guy would fly his private helicopter to find out why you didn't answer the phone. But I loved it. And I definitely didn't find it stalkerish. The point was made: she was in control.

Once she knew what she was dealing with, she seemed to have no problem letting Christian know what her boundaries were, and what she wanted in return: love and romance. Quite frankly, they seemed to have better communication than I had in my last relationship.

And I totally disagree with the suggestions that the film glorifies rape. She never says no. In fact, I thought the screenwriter, Kelly Marcel, did an excellent job making it clear that Christian respected Ana's comfort zone and boundaries.

Up until she ASKS him to show her how bad it gets, the way he "hits" her seemed erotic, not violent. Once it crosses that line, she leaves. And she's sober the entire time with Christian, unlike much of today's college coeds who leave themselves way too vulnerable for my comfort zone. Again - totally healthy behavior.

As Richard Brody writes in The New Yorker, Fifty Shades of Grey "isn't a joke, and it isn't complete junk. The movie is far from a masterwork, but the glossy fantasies of Fifty Shades deliver something altogether significant, substantial, and welcome."

Yeah - a strong, self-respecting woman who isn't afraid to use her power to find love, ask for what she wants, and walk away when it goes wrong. Long live Anastasia.

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